


if you don't know me by now

by ioncehadabrain



Category: Naruto
Genre: (sort of), Anachronistic, Character Study, F/M, Gen, headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-24 11:41:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13810455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ioncehadabrain/pseuds/ioncehadabrain
Summary: "you will never never never know me, ooh ooh-ohh"





	if you don't know me by now

**Author's Note:**

> written as part of tumblr's 2018 Tenten appreciation month. also, technically my first Naruto fic, ever. happy birthday, darling dearest.

She brushes her hair with a comb dipped in steamy hot water graced with tiny bunches of pomelo flowers. It's a late February thing; other times of the year, oil extract from the leaves would have to do.

A convenient byproduct is the haze of activity it gives her every day these few weeks: she plucks from the rough stretching barks clusters and clusters of fragrance and puts them in rattan woven baskets of all sorts – big, small, round on the mouth, or like a fisherman's creel – and dries them under the sun, then drops them in the softly sizzling ceramic pot at dusk to bask in the fresh purity and, as night falls, she brushes her hair.

“ _dạ lai u mộng hốt hoàn hương._  
_tiểu hiên song,_  
_chính sơ trang._  
_tương cố vô ngôn_ -”

( _last night my lonely dream took me home._  
_by a small window_  
_she was combing and making up._  
_we gazed at each other, speechless_ -)

He opened the door to her hospital’s room and was greeted with the sight of her standing by the tall windows opened wide and bold, on the sill a pot of steam, in the air the familiar gentle scent of pomelo flower in early spring seeping through her fingers and in her hair. In her hands he saw the small fine-toothed wooden comb; she looked up at him and her lips traced a faint pleasant sweetness of smile: just what I need– come, would you put the flowers in the water and stir them for me? Only your delicate hands would do.

His face betrayed nothing by the stoic serious unfeeling strain between his slightly knitted brows; but he trembled as he stepped towards her and gladly offered his delicate hands at her service.

.

.

.

It went without saying that she had a particular passion for fortune-telling. One of her latest immensely justifiable reasons for the borderline childish superstition: Hyuuga Neji liked to let it dawn on people as they fell face flat on the grounds after he pulled his almighty all-encompassing Hyuuga _kaiten_ trick that they were by fate inferior to such exquisite bloodline and strength, and when she managed to direct her plain reliable razor-sharp daggers to slash their way through his pretty hair, she would tell him that it was a pattern she saw in her tea leaves yesterday in her biweekly conversations with her stars, so really, where’s your fate now?

.

.

.

She had never been really tempted to paint her face and draw her eyebrows long and languidly like a stroke of clouds dragging across the moonlit face of the night sky; but brushing her hair with pomelo flower scent was one point of girlish vanity she could never really give up. By way of excuse, it helped to know that she had grown up with it and in it; her mother had an orchard and she dedicated half of it to pomelo. Tenten had learned to walk with hands spread horizontally in the air for balance, like any other 9 months-old, after tripping over 9-and-a-half times out of 10, had run and fallen and had her first scar, had slept, had eaten, had sung and wept under those barks, the round weight of a pomelo in the red spread of her large skirt, and the fragrance of blooming season in her hair, under her skin, in her eyes, in her mind.

.

.

.

The thing with Hyuuga Neji was that, while he was absolutely a merciless and pretentious bastard with warped passive-aggressive tendency to delegate most matters in life to the hands of fate, and she had to try her very damnedest so as not to break down in the dirt every time he threw her to the ground, he was also relentlessly above appearances and sickening common niceties. Tenten didn't feel the need to be polished with him; she straight up punched him to the grounds in answer when they trained, straight up told him when he was being rude at the expense of whatever goal they were under the obligation to try and cooperate to achieve at the moment, and straight up basked in the comfort of plainness and raw face and honest words, a joy of personal detachment, a much needed distance from the eyes of others. She could think clearer this way and he would grow a bit out of his usual brooding resentful shell and together the two of them could be so much more than the only life they had known over the last 10 years or so since the first moment of clarity in their memories. A partnership not religiously prayed for or demanded with any other formal notion of the act, but perhaps it was written in the stars that they came together, and his ominous fate did have a say in certain things after all.

.

.

.

"- _duy hữu lệ thiên hàng_ "

(- _only a thousand rows of tears_ )

She always wakes up with eyes dry as the sand in the desert. But, in her dreams, the rough cotton of the double layers on his shirt's shoulder pad, the fabric of his collar, the skin of his neck and the side of his cheek are always soaked with tear stains. She thinks, like Lin Daiyu, she must have owed him a lifetime's worth of water when she might have been a tree spirit in her last incarnation, hence she is doomed to cry him a lifetime's worth of tears as some sort of payment dictated by karmic fairness in the scheme of all things.

The way she has always understood it in silent solidarity with him, though, is that life – the conceptualization of it to them; what comes before this life as they know it and what comes after; where it begins and where it ends – all their life, they could only afford to live in the moment. It isn’t that they weren’t capable of seeing past today, but they have always lived (-has been living, only one of them now, on her own, she-) more out of a prescient sense of self-preservation, more in the sense that, every moment they live and breathe, they seize and secure. Dreams are on the horizons of tomorrow, and tomorrow-

Tomorrow is a wonderful time of the day, it gets them moving in fear and excitement, but it is also not-yet and it is the anticipation grounded in today – that’s the realm of reality in which they both seem to exist. So it goes: life on the plane of time – which one of those sagely old men have looked at the sky and said, “Life is but a grand fleeting dream?” – this life of theirs is an illusion, and so when it ends, it is when they wake up to see where they themselves really begin and-

-it is probably fair by all karmic scheming's standards that she pays him her debt of tears from their last life in the rest of her dreams of this life.

.

.

.

The deal with make-ups and accessories, she thinks, is that they are all about temptations. A pair of earrings with red long strands swinging on the sides of her neck is the agony and solace from the ghost of an almost lover's caress. The long fluid pencil stroke threatens to fall from where it's supposed to halt at the tail of her eyebrow and, an inch downward, later, marks a spot on the skin below the corner of her eye. A "mole of widowed tears," as her mother must have told her, at some point. A wicked trait of damnation nested in the narrative to make sure one never runs out of things to blame a woman for – chaos, destruction, loss of a man's life. But her mother had worn it like a jewel and like a long weep that ended up fueling the songs and the smiles, and every morning, standing in front of the mirror to prepare herself for the world, Tenten prays: lend me the grace. Lend me the strength.

The strands stay by her side. The mole fades into her skin and flows in her veins.

.

.

.

“ _i stop wasting time on tears,_  
_i live another fifty years_ -”

The village rules grant the Hyuugas immunity and complete independence and impeachable power of decision regarding exclusively their clan's matters – so really, there's not much she can do as an outsider whose clan political leverage is consisted of a total of none. Hell, she doesn't even carry a last name, and while there's not much need for it the way she has been building her life fine so far, there are surely times when she feels the need for one and this is one of such times and- (let's be honest, whose fault is that for dying before tossing her a complete contingency plan with a marriage seal on their names, so she could rightfully meddle in his business?) -it is no use crying over spilled milk (or blood).

So here's an idea: Tenten, humble nobody-used-to-be Tenten, lovely Tenten whose face you somehow can never really recall-

(except: when she really looks at you with her frighteningly bright eyes when not shielded by the soft abundant bangs. Her distinctive hairstyle is an attempt at compromising with the world, for she was born to pass as the perfect spy, the one opponent to whom those with the nerves to call themselves proud and strong – which is frankly up to debate until all are engaged in actual combat – would most likely lose because of fatal underestimation. But her compromise to the world – to the team, to him – in the interest of good faith is the pomelo flower scent in her hair, the glistening sweat on her plain un-polished face, the soft light curve of her armpit when she used to wear the sleeveless pink qipao top, casually exposed just so when they lied in exhaustion and enlightenment after a mid-summer sparring session. She drops the hints, and the few of those who know how to follow would pick them up.)

-lovely Tenten, whose face you somehow can never recall clearly enough, could, to compensate for all the privileges and connections she wasn't born with, teach. Show up in formative years of the village's kings, shape the young minds, drop a few stories here and there, make arguments tangible, present more than one side and angle to a matter, slam a reminder of more than one voice in the narrative- those sorts of things. Surely, what does one small ninja academy teacher, one genin team sensei know, as opposed to the harbored wisdom and traditions of the great clans? A nobody who used to fight in the war just like every other ninja of her generation, a passerby paling in comparison to legends and descendants of legends and disciples of legends-

But surely, she thinks, one must start somewhere. And while that can never be enough, his dreams- their dreams should suffice.

So it goes: on the twenty-second of February, two years after the war, she dipped the comb in the pot, a cluster of white and soft sweet fragrance floating in and out of the steam, she brushed her hair, then made the two braids and twisted up the two buns on the sides, she picked up her calligraphy set roll, behind her lower-back dangled the roll for everything else ('Roll-for-all? Tenten, the fact that I feel compelled to repeat the phrase should speak to you of its absurd nature-') and on her way down the stairs she took two steps at a time and out she went, towards the Hokage tower, to accept her official assignment as a teacher, an exemplar for the new generations – the pride and hope of a village still dampened with the smoke of wars – and who was she? Another rock on the street that paves the way and, in the stream of time, as the budding young minds grow, would probably be forgotten, and yet- refuses to build pedestals, not now, not ever.

(“ _and when my time is up,_  
_have i done enough?_  
_will they tell our story?_  
_oh, i can’t wait to see you again_ -”)

And the rest is history waiting to be found.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Title and summary are from [this song](https://soundcloud.com/ioncehadabrain/if-you-dont-know-me-by-now?in=ioncehadabrain/sets/if-you-dont-know-me-by-now/s-KP6bl).
> 
> 2\. The verse in part 1 and 5 are from a ci-poem written to the tune of "Jiangchengzi" 江城子 (River City) by Su Dongpo which, according to his prefatory note, is to record a dream of his first wife who had passed away at least 10 years before the time of the poem. The original poem is composed in traditional Chinese, of course, but I chose to use its Sino-Vietnamese phonetic transliteration. The English translation is by Ronald C. Egan. Here's the part I used in its original Chinese, for reference: 
> 
> 夜來幽夢忽還鄉，  
> 小軒窗，  
> 正梳妝。  
> 相顧無言，  
> 惟有淚千行。 
> 
> 3\. Lin Daiyu is a protagonist in [_Dream of the Red Chamber_ by Cao Xueqin](http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Dream_of_the_Red_Chamber#Lin_Daiyu). I borrowed the premise story that (supposedly) explains Daiyu and her love interest's karmic bond and debts from their last life.
> 
> 5\. "Life is but a grand fleeting dream" is probably a popular paraphrasing of Zhuangzi and his infamous philosophical dilemma of [the man dreaming himself to be a butterfly](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zhuangzi#Zhuangzi). 
> 
> 4\. The verse in part 7 is Eliza Hamilton's lines in "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story" from _Hamilton: An American Musical_ by Lin-Manuel Miranda.


End file.
